Sunday, March 03, 2013

While few major league teams offer extensive vision training, the Nationals are hoping to further incorporate it. Players such as Bryce Harper, Steve Lombardozzi and Brown swear by it. This season, the players will have an extra training room at Nationals Park where they can have easy access to the equipment and integrate it into their daily workouts. By this time next season, the Nationals hope to have all minor league players in Class A and Class AA under vision-training programs.
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The biggest proponent of vision training on the Nationals is, oddly enough, a player with naturally perfect vision. Lombardozzi first started practicing vision exercises in high school because his father, a former major league second baseman, did a version of the training when he played. Lombardozzi, who lives near Columbia in the offseason, has trained with Smithson at his Arlington office for the past two winters, visiting two to three times per week. As part of his routine, Lombardozzi has to touch one of the 32 red buttons that light up across an electronic reaction board that hangs from the wall. His best score is a 4,900 — far above the score of 2,500 that Smithson establishes as a baseline for players.
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Every time before he enters a game, whether as a starter or pinch hitter, Lombardozzi tracks smaller baseballs in the batting cages without swinging while wearing strobe glasses. Like a flashing strobe light, the glasses block out what a player sees at different speeds and rob the brain of images. “You take those off and it makes it seem like the guy throwing is moving slower,” Lombardozzi said. “You’re slowing the ball down and you’re just taking that feeling into the game.”

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